A service-oriented architecture isn’t a technology; it’s a way of doing business. It can even be a way of transforming your business.

That point was driven home time and again this year by SOA-using CIO 100 honorees (and there were lots of them). Reworking your IT framework as an SOA takes time, money, nerve and a strong business driver. Done correctly and for the right reasons, an SOA can save money on development costs (eventually) and increase your agility. But getting to an SOA requires bold thinking and even bolder action. To do it right, everyone in your enterprise, both on the IT and business sides, must change how they look at the business. It can force business-side people to put off short-term opportunity in favor of long-term goals. It can make IT developers think in terms of service levels and reusability while simultaneously forcing them to relinquish complete control over processes such as quality assurance. It’s about change management, technology management, risk management and simply dealing with management.

If all that sounds scary, it is. But step into the deep, dark SOA woods and you’ll find some trails are already being blazed. And our bold honorees have even left a few breadcrumbs for you to follow.

SOA Defined

At its simplest, an SOA turns application functionality into the software equivalent of Lego bricks. Take a piece of software (say, a customer-number verification tool), strap a well-defined interface onto it, and let other applications use the new "service" as needed. Create a library of such mix-and-match parts, and you can build composite applications to meet almost any business need, the same way Legos can morph from castle to crocodile to catapult when the same components are rearranged. But unlike object-oriented programming, in which chunks of reusable code are compiled to create new applications, services can live on widely distributed servers, ready to be tapped only when needed. How services are built, on which operating systems they run or within which applications they reside aren’t important as long as they support standard connection interfaces.

If that sounds like pie in the sky for the IT crowd, you’re right to be skeptical. SOA isn’t a cure-all. Nor will it (or should it) replace every tightly integrated instance in your company. But employed properly, SOA can grease rusty IT joints and make the whole organization more flexible—a bold goal that made SOA a worthwhile risk for several of our honorees.